Symphony Showbiz and Celebrity Breaking News

Catherine Bray In a typical scene from “An Endless Sunday,” three teenage delinquents wander beside a canal. They end up killing a frog with a brick. Another group of children slightly younger than they are are also mucking about, and one of them is playing the recorder, blasting out a wobbly but recognizable version of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the second movement.

Travel blog by Travels of Adam (Hipster Blog) – Travels of Adam (Hipster Blog) - Travel & Lifestyle Hipster Blog Planning the perfect picnic is an art in itself, and choosing the right food and drinks can make it an absolute blast. Hosting hundreds of park picnics, rooftop barbecues and spontaneous outdoor get-togethers, I thought I’d share my guide to hosting the perfect summer picnic. Things to Consider When Planning a Picnic Party Planning the perfect picnic is like orchestrating a symphony of flavors, laughter, and sunshine.

Sophia Scorziello editor Virginia’s Middleburg Film Festival, now in its 11th year, is set to open this October with Netflix’s Bayard Rustin biopic “Rustin” starring Colman Domingo. Director George C.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic It’s almost cosmic, the way kids start out as nothing more than a twinkle in their mother’s eye. Then they’re born into heavenly little bodies, orbiting the adults who made them like tiny moons, until such time that they overcome their parents’ gravitational pull. So it is with “Janet Planet,” one of those intensely personal portraits of childhood that we’ve come to expect — and appreciate — from A24, the indie studio behind “Moonlight” and “Lady Bird” and “Aftersun” and “Eighth Grade” (the example this one most resembles).

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic “Be kind, because everyone you meet is fighting a great battle” — that popular maxim (or some variation thereof) is often brought up in the context of remembering to have some sympathy for jerks. But it could also be applied to people whose lives seem too charmed to be true.

Addie Morfoot Contributor In his latest documentary, “American Symphony,” Oscar-nominated director Matthew Heineman delivers a portrait of two artists — Grammy winner and former “Late Show With Stephen Colbert” bandleader Jon Batiste and his wife, author Suleika Jaouad. Heineman is known for putting his life on the line to make documentaries about the Mexican drug wars (“Cartel Land”), the initial explosion of COVID-19 in the U.S.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor “Not a Word,” which is being sold by international sales agency Beta Cinema, will have its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in the competitive Platform section. Variety speaks to the film’s writer-director, Hanna Slak, and debuts its trailer. “Not a Word” tells the story of a relationship crisis between a parent and her teenage son.

Naman Ramachandran Prime Video India has set a global premiere date for crime thriller series “Bambai Meri Jaan,” produced by Excel Media and Entertainment’s Ritesh Sidhwani, Kassim Jagmagia and Farhan Akhtar. Created by Rensil D’Silva (“Dial 100”) and Shujaat Saudagar (“The Underbug”) and directed by Saudagar, the Amazon original 10-episode series is based on a story by S. Hussain Zaidi (“Lahore Confidential”).

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Olivér Rudolf’s “My Mother, the Monster” has won the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award at Sarajevo Film Festival’s CineLink, its industry section that featured projects from Southeast Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. The Hungarian feature film project, which is produced by Genovéva Petrovits at Kino Alfa, received a cash prize of €20,000 ($21,727). The film focuses on Éva, a mother in her forties who is disappointed with her life and tired of feeling insignificant.

Truck Festival last weekend has gone viral for moshing to an orchestra performance in the rain.During the Oxfordshire festival, the Oxford Symphony Orchestra performed on the festival’s main stage and got a raucous response.After the performance, videos of the crowd have gone viral, which see the crowd creating a rowdy moshpit to the sedate music.Songs given the moshpit treatment included the orchestra’s versions of John Williams’ ‘Indiana Jones Theme’ and Gioachino Rossini’s ‘William Tell Overture’.See footage of the proceedings below.

Liam Payne is opening up about his sobriety and in a new video on YouTube, revealed to fans that he’s now six months sober.

PBS is gearing up for a star-studded and explosive celebration for the Fourth of July!

The Fourth of July holiday on Tuesday features several traditional music and fireworks special presentations on TV and streaming online in primetime. Here is a rundown:

Alissa Simon Film Critic Bulgarian multi-hyphenate Stephan Komandarev completes his trilogy on social problems and moral ills in contemporary Bulgaria with “Blaga’s Lessons,” world premiering in Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s Crystal Globe competition. Heretic is the sales agent. After “Directions” (2017), which centers on tough times for some Sofia taxi drivers over a long and eventful night, and “Rounds” (2019), about police officers patrolling the capital, Komandarev and his co-writer Simeon Ventsislavov use an older woman duped by a telephone scam to look at issues afflicting their parents’ generation. Komandarev says: “The Bulgarian pensioners turned out to be the real victims of the so-called ‘transition’ (the time from 1989 to today.) These people, who have worked and created persistently all their lives, have lost basic safety and security, normal food, adequate medical care, heating, etc.”

Emiliano De Pablos Banijay’s Shine Iberia and Mexican studio Dopamine are joining forces with renowned Spanish composer Lucas Vidal (“Elite,” “Fast & Furious 6”) on musical interview travel series “Tu vida en 3 minutos” (“Your Life in 3 Minutes”). Created by Shine Iberia’s Begoña Marín in partnership with Dopamine’s writers-directors Xevi Aranda and Sebastián Reyes, “Your Life in 3 Minutes” is one of the four projects selected at Conecta Fiction & Entertainment 2023’s Pitch Feelgood Formats sidebar. The seventh edition of Conecta Fiction runs June 26-29 in Toledo, the capital of Spain’s Castilla-La Mancha. 

Love The Weekender? Share it with a friend and spread the word!Sign Up For The WeekenderSwitzer Falls HikeI’ve never understood the universal attraction to waterfalls. They’re thunderously loud and also, I feel like if you’ve seen one waterfall, you’ve seem them all. I hiked through a jungle for hours to get to a well-known waterfall in Bali.

Tara Karajica On Tuesday, Alexander Payne’s “Downsizing” opened the 2nd Evia Film Project, in the presence of the two-time Oscar-winning director. The green initiative was launched by the Thessaloniki Film Festival last year to offer support to Northern Evia following the devastating 2021 wildfires. The event runs to June 24 with an enhanced program. The films of this year’s edition are a mix of both classics and recent hits, feature films and documentaries. They have been selected to raise awareness, inform, incite to action, bring to light the repercussions of human-driven activities and mankind’s relation to the environment and, last but not least, praise nature’s magic.

Derek Hough is staying in shape for the summer!

Disney is celebrating their 100th anniversary!

Alfonso Ribeiro will host PBS’s A Capitol Fourth, the annual Independence Day celebration on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol.

Derek Hough let the cat out of the bag.

Lewis Capaldi is currently outselling the rest of the Official Albums Chart Top 20 combined as he surges towards Number 1 with Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent. 

PBS’s National Memorial Day Concert will return on May 28 with a lineup that includes a tribute to Vietnam War POWs and Gold Star families, as well as a commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Korean War Armistice and a remembrance of World War II.

Tom Hanks revealed that he didn't initially think his Oscar-winning role in 1994’s "Forrest Gump" would resonate with audiences. "I say, 'Hey [director] Bob [Zemeckis], I've got a question for you.

Christine and the Queens has today (May 9) shared an emotive new track, ‘Tears Can Be So Soft’. Listen to the track below.The French singer-songwriter’s new album ‘PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE’ is due for release June 9 and will follow-up last year’s ‘Redcar les adorables étoiles’.

The “Ted Lasso” scene that challenged co-creator Brendan Hunt the most in terms of keeping a straight face was in Season 3’s Episode 7, “The Strings That Bind Us.” Coach Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) tweaked a Japanese idea that Coach Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) explains to his players in which an invisible red string connects soulmates by their little fingers. Kent decides the players should practice with the string tied to their penises.“Episode 6 is pretty, and somewhat serious,” Hunt told TheWrap at an Emmys FYC carpet in Hollywood Monday, video of which you can watch above.

Los Angeles Times, concert-goer Molly Grant was quoted describing the sound as a “scream/moan.” She said that she saw what happened and said the sound came from a woman, heavily breathing, sitting with her partner. “Her partner was smiling and looking at her — like in an effort to not shame her,” Grant said.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Rights to ‘Man in Black,” one of two documentary films by China’s Wang Bing to appear in Official Selection at Cannes this year, have been picked up by specialty sales agency Asian Shadows. The 60-minute film, which will debut as a special screening, is a portrait of 86-year-old Wang Xilin, one of China’s most important modern classical composers and is now lives in exile in Germany. It was made in close collaboration with French cinematographer Caroline Champetier, whose credits include Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors,” Amos Gitai’s “Promised Land” and Andre Techine’s “Alice and Martin.” During the 1960s, when China’s Cultural Revolution forced intellectuals into the fields and stripped the middle classes of their wealth, Wang Xilin was the was the target of severe persecution, including beatings, imprisonment and torture. The film examines the body and soul of a man scarred by a life of suffering, who is yet still capable of deep and sincere compassion.

Blair Tindall, the concert oboist whose 2005 memoir Mozart In The Jungle was adapted into a hit 2014 comedy-drama series on Amazon Prime, died of heart disease in Los Angeles on April 12. She was 63.

Max and Cartoon Network have greenlit an animated take on the classic tale Peter & the Wolf, featuring music and narration by Gavin Friday, and artwork based on original illustrations by Bono. The short film, slated to premiere later this year, transforms Sergei Prokofiev’s symphony into a contemporary piece that touches on themes of growing up, loss, courage, transformation, and our relationship with nature. The project was originally developed in 2003 by Gavin Friday and Bono in support of Irish Hospice Foundation, a national charity supporting those facing dying, death and bereavement.

Ben Croll An irreverent fable that imagines a civilization’s rise, fracture and fall, Pedro Harres’ “From the Main Square” took top honors at the NewImages Festival on Friday, claiming the festival’s Grand Prize, which came with €6,000 ($6,597) in prize money. Born in Brazil and based in Berlin, Harres channeled his frustrations and heartache about his native country into a tragicomic frenzy, orchestrating a 360-degree symphony of animated antics, human folly, and shocking bursts of violence that follows an allegorical country as it speed-runs toward oblivion. The filmmaker described the project as “a collage of urban absurdities, sometimes funny, sometimes brutal, that arise in societies in the process of political polarization and environmental collapse.”

Tim Greiving I’ve been listening to classical music all my life, been to hundreds of symphony orchestra concerts, and even written concert notes for the LA Phil. But I often still feel like a yokel in the woods without a map when it comes to navigating classical music. So, like a hungry mouse in a maze, I journeyed into the new Classical app from Apple. Classical is an entirely different species from popular music — i.e., the music of the people for the past century. Pop artists may crib chord progressions from Bach or add string arrangements for sophistication, and pop music certainly wouldn’t exist without its classy ancestor. But the Classical app makes it clear just how disparate these two animals are, and it starts with the way they’re organized and cataloged.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter “32 Sounds,” an immersive and experiential documentary, has sold North American rights to Abramorama following its premiere at Sundance Film Festival. The movie, which explores the phenomenon of sound through 32 specific sonic experiences, will begin its nationwide theatrical rollout at New York City’s Film Forum on April 28. To complete the unique auditory experience, several venues, including Film Forum, will offer audience members individual sets of headphones so they can watch “32 Sounds” the way the filmmaker intended. “32 Sounds” had its world premiere at Sundance, where it played to positive reviews. Variety’s chief film critic Peter Debruge wrote that the movie is “bursting with humor, emotion and curiosity” and praised it as a “rare and rewarding sonic journey with the potential to enrich our lives.”

Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter has shared new single ‘Le Minotaure’ ahead of the release of his first orchestral album ‘Mythologies’.The album was originally conceived for a ballet score and was performed in July 2022 at Bordeaux’s Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux.Mythologies was co-produced by Opéra National de Bordeaux and Ballet Preljocal. Taking place over 90 minutes, it aimed to tackle the “founding myths that shape the collective imagination”.Set to arrive on April 7, the former Daft Punk member’s album doesn’t draw on electronic music.

Cate Blanchett hit the red carpet in a chic turtleneck look for the premiere of her newest movie, TÁR, held during the 2023 Berlinale Film Festival in Germany on Thursday (February 23).

—particularly the bit in the middle where she tries to shout out all the female nominees by name in a 40-second rap verse—has gone viral since she performed at the February 19 ceremony. And the commentary on Twitter has reached such a pitch that DeBose resorted to deactivating her whole account. The performance, which included renditions of “Sisters are Doin’ It For Themselves” and “We Are Family” at either end of the rap verse, was clearly intended as a tribute to the large number of women who were nominated at the awards.